Transfers and Development: Easy Come, Easy Go?

Contrary to the popular notion that money that is easily earned, is also easily spent, economic theory holds that income is fungible. Drawing on the concept of mental accounting, this study theoretically explores when such a link between spending behaviour and the effort dispensed in obtaining income is plausible. Empirically, it is found that the marginal propensity to consume from unearned income is about three times larger than that from earned income, based on household panel data from rural China, with the difference more pronounced when unearned income is transitory and smaller than earned income. The policy implications are real

An effective and efficient testing methodology for correctness testing for file recovery tools

We hereby develop an effective and efficient testing methodology for correctness testing for file recovery tools across different file systems. We assume that the tool tester is familiar with the formats of common file types and has the ability to use the tools correctly. Our methodology first derives a testing plan to minimize the number of runs required to identify the differences in tools with respect to correctness. We also present a case study on correctness testing for file carving tools, which allows us to confirm that the number of necessary testing runs is bounded and our results are statistically sound. <br /

Who is vouching for the input voucher ? decentralized targeting and elite capture in Tanzania

Input subsidy programs carry support as instruments to increase agricultural productivity, provided they are market-smart. This requires especially proper targeting to contain the fiscal pressure, with decentralized targeting of input vouchers currently the instrument of choice. Nonetheless, despite clear advantages in administrative costs, the fear of elite capture persists. These fears are borne out in the experience from the 2008 input voucher pilot program in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, examined here. Elected village officials received about 60 percent of the distributed vouchers, a factor that significantly reduced the targeting performance of the program, especially in more unequal and remote communities. When targeting the poor, greater coverage and a focus on high trust settings helped mitigate these concerns. The findings highlight the continuing need for scrutiny when relying on decentralized targeting. A clearer sense of purpose (increasing productivity among poorer farmers versus increasing aggregate output) could also enhance the targeting performance.Rural Poverty Reduction,Economic Theory&Research,Housing&Human Habitats,Services&Transfers to Poor,Regional Economic Development

Transfers and Development: Easy Come, Easy Go?

Contrary to the popular notion that money that is easily earned, is also easily spent, economic theory holds that income is fungible. Drawing on the concept of mental accounting, this study theoretically explores when such a link between spending behaviour and the effort dispensed in obtaining income is plausible. Empirically, it is found that the marginal propensity to consume from unearned income is about three times larger than that from earned income, based on household panel data from rural China, with the difference more pronounced when unearned income is transitory and smaller than earned income. The policy implications are real.transfers, saving, mental accounting, permanent income hypothesis, China

Design and optimization of joint iterative detection and decoding receiver for uplink polar coded SCMA system

SCMA and polar coding are possible candidates for 5G systems. In this paper, we firstly propose the joint iterative detection and decoding (JIDD) receiver for the uplink polar coded sparse code multiple access (PC-SCMA) system. Then, the EXIT chart is used to investigate the performance of the JIDD receiver. Additionally, we optimize the system design and polar code construction based on the EXIT chart analysis. The proposed receiver integrates the factor graph of SCMA detector and polar soft-output decoder into a joint factor graph, which enables the exchange of messages between SCMA detector and polar decoder iteratively. Simulation results demonstrate that the JIDD receiver has better BER performance and lower complexity than the separate scheme. Specifically, when polar code length N=256 and code rate R=1/2 , JIDD outperforms the separate scheme 4.8 and 6 dB over AWGN channel and Rayleigh fading channel, respectively. It also shows that, under 150% system loading, the JIDD receiver only has 0.3 dB performance loss compared to the single user uplink PC-SCMA over AWGN channel and 0.6 dB performance loss over Rayleigh fading channel